Posted this in the Headlines thread...thanks for doing it here as well jeff

This topic became somewhat personal for me this past Friday...i was waiting at my school to pick up my kids when one of the other drivers came over to talk... She asked me if i knew a certain student from 2 years ago...i said i did thru certain friendships of other students on my bus
The student i'm talking about was bright and always seemed to have a smile on her face...she would always be the first to volunteer to help younger kids get to their bus
Apparently (don't know the details yet) she got on her bus (with her older brother) on Thursday...they got off and the older brother decided to walk to a buddy's house instead of going straight home with her
When the family arrived later they discovered that she had hung herself in the backyard

Posted this in the Headlines thread...thanks for doing it here as well jeff

This topic became somewhat personal for me this past Friday...i was waiting at my school to pick up my kids when one of the other drivers came over to talk... She asked me if i knew a certain student from 2 years ago...i said i did thru certain friendships of other students on my bus
The student i'm talking about was bright and always seemed to have a smile on her face...she would always be the first to volunteer to help younger kids get to their bus
Apparently (don't know the details yet) she got on her bus (with her older brother) on Thursday...they got off and the older brother decided to walk to a buddy's house instead of going straight home with her
When the family arrived later they discovered that she had hung herself in the backyard

Apparently because of bullying

She was 14 years old

Wow, so ridiculous. Same thing happened to my mother's neighbor. He was 16 and used to come to my mother's place and sit and talk to her when he saw her sitting on her deck, used to help her out cutting her lawn. Great kid, a month ago he went for a walk and climbed the main street bridge in Welland and jumped about 10 stories landing on the street. Apparently also was bullied. My mother was shaken up over it for sure, she said he was such a good kid. You would think that all this happening would have these kids think twice about pushing kids around and treating them like yesterday's garbage. I believe that society today is turned off to emotion due to video games, technology and less and less human contact. Take a look at the Amanda Todd case, she drank bleach and kids wrote that it was too bad she didn't die......really people this is what gets you off? Hoping people off themselves, almost cheering them on?

Now Carol wants to tell her story. It is a story no mother wants to tell.

“Amanda was a very caring individual. She would help others who needed help,” Carol told The Vancouver Sun during an exclusive interview Friday at her home, where she was surrounded by friends and family. “One of Amanda’s goals was to get her message out there and have it used as a learning tool for others.”

As a teacher in the Coquitlam school district and a specialist in assistive technologies, Carol is comfortable around computers and knows well the dangers the online world can hold. Still, she wasn’t able to protect her child.

“I have lost one child, but know she wanted her story to save 1,000 more.”

Amanda was 12 years old when she made a mistake that would haunt her until her death three years later.

Her ordeal started while she was fooling around online with friends. She probably didn’t think it was risky behaviour when she lifted her top to flash the person who was flattering her at the other end of the webcam.

Amanda’s moment of indiscretion was not unusual for someone her age: Sexting and using webcams to share sexual photos is a growing trend among children, some so young they are still in grade school.

“The Internet stalker she flashed kept stalking her,” said Carol. “Every time she moved schools he would go undercover and become a Facebook friend. What the guy did was he went online to the kids who went to (the new school) and said that he was going to be a new student — that he was starting school the following week and that he wanted some friends and could they friend him on Facebook.”

“He eventually gathered people’s names and sent Amanda’s video to her new school.”

The video and photos went to teachers, to parents, to Facebook friends, which lead to repeated taunts: “Oh, there’s the porn star.”

“It increased her anxiety and she couldn’t go to class,” Carol said.

In putting together her video, which Amanda did on her own, Carol said her daughter wanted to help other young people who are being bullied and to bring attention and education to the problem in the hope of seeing it eradicated.

“Amanda wanted to tell her story to help other kids. I want to tell my story to help parents, so they can be aware, so they can teach their kids what is right and wrong and how to be safe online,” she said. “Kids have iPads, they have smartphones, technology is much more accessible than it was even five years ago — that is the dangerous factor.”

When Amanda’s story and video went viral this week, the outpouring of grief from local teens left Carol unable to distinguish Amanda’s true friends from those who may have helped drive her to suicide.

Carol has launched a trust fund in Amanda’s memory to raise money for anti-bullying awareness education and for support programs for youth with mental health issues.

Amanda was the victim of unrelenting blackmail. And the cyberspace stalker was aided by people in Amanda’s real-world life — kids who would share the photos on their cellphones, kids who would gang up to hurl first verbal abuse and then fists at her.

“Everything she said in the video happened over the past two years,” said Carol. “It was horrendous. I think about it now and I think, ‘Oh my God. How did she survive this long with the pain?’ ”

That photograph she regretted so profoundly, the image that haunted, can’t hurt her anymore.

The dead don’t cry or cringe.

Friends and strangers weep for her now, of course they do. Perhaps there is also remorse among those who tormented the girl — but more likely, more honestly, alarm that they will be exposed.

The cabal of bullies which badgered the teenager into suicide has left its spoor on social media. And, as Amanda elliptically reminds, their fingerprints are out there forever — on a hard drive, a Facebook wall, the Twitter detritus — and can be retrieved.

The cursed Web has a lot to answer for.

It is an inanimate thing, hardly even an object, more a fourth dimension where just about anything goes, no matter how vile and possibly even criminal. Courts have barely started to catch up with the phenomenon of cyber menace, parameters of privacy laws, execution of search warrants for Internet subscribers.

If there was a bridge previously too far to cross ethically, at least among the masses who don’t consider themselves brutes because they never laid a hand on anybody, didn’t stalk, it’s been breeched on the Web.

A whole generation has grown up lacking the restraint demanded by face-to-face encounters. They’ve embraced the concept of non-accountability, of slagging without consequences. That makes them no different from adults who go online to slime, yowling into cyberspace. But teenagers hurt more deeply, have fewer coping skills to deal with rejection and humiliation. They even think suicide is a kind of holding purgatory for lost souls, not grasping the finality of self-destruction.

For Amanda, the 15-year-old girl who took her life on Wednesday, just weeks removed from posting a heartbreaking video on YouTube about social alienation and shattering unkindness, the preying was not merely online. Her clot of pestering pursuers, youths who wouldn’t let her be, attacked in person as well, ambushed her on the way home from school, left her moaning in a ditch.

But the malice began years earlier, online. And she couldn’t escape it, not by changing schools, not by moving cities, and not by crushed attempts to reinvent herself, be born again as a girl different from the one who’d made some mistakes, youthful errors of judgment. A past that was not really so very objectionable hounded her in the present, and in the ether presence, of harassers.

I wonder what those abusers think now. I wonder what, if anything, they’ll tell their grandchildren years from now, about the time they drove a fragile girl to kill herself. More probably they’ll never speak a word of it, bound only to each other by evil secrets. And when the outrage dies down, I suspect they’ll be forgiven, because they were young and rash and didn’t mean to do such grievous harm. But they did mean it, surely; they’re not children, they weren’t just passively provoking.

When I cover trials of young offenders who’ve committed serious crimes, I always wonder: Where did they come from? What made them this way? Where were the parents and teachers and more right-thinking friends? But these are quantifiable crimes — a youth with a gun or a knife and so often palpably damaged themselves.

On social media, the harm slithers between the cracks of self-confidence, it undermines and eviscerates. Apart from the victim and the culprits blasting missives — sometimes from the realm of anonymity, sometimes as identifiable aggressors — who among us even knows when a child is suffering from cyber bullying? Many are not inclined to tell, though Amanda did.

She told everyone in that forlorn, nine-minute YouTube posting, shuffling her thick clutch of flash cards, the camera capturing only brief glimpses of her face, such a pretty face, while “Hear You Me” by Jimmy Eat World plays softly in the background.

At that point, Amanda had already once attempted suicide by swallowing bleach, had transferred schools, moved from one parent’s home in Maple Ridge, B.C., to another parent’s home in Coquitlam.

The ache without end is clear in the sentences she wrote, phrase by phrase per flash card, documenting years of bullying and shaming. It started in Grade 7 with an ill-advised and embarrassing topless photo circulated to friends, relatives and schoolmates. She’d sent it out, at the urging, apparently, of her friends. Such a minor indiscretion and so common a rite of exhibitionism among teenagers today, but this picture came back to bite Amanda a year later, on the Internet and, later, affixed to a boy’s Facebook page.

Harassment continued at her new school and then exploded into vicious taunting, baiting, following a brief involvement with a boy who, turns out, already had a girlfriend. As a pack, that couple and their friends assaulted her, the attack apparently filmed — because everything is preserved on cellphone video these days. Depressed, she took to cutting herself.

Bullies continued to vilify her, posting photos of bleach, wishing her dead. They were remorseless and pitiless.

Yet she was strong, Amanda, until she couldn’t be strong anymore. And even then, she displayed a charity that was never afforded her.

“I’m struggling to stay in this world, because everything just touches me so deeply. I’m not doing this for attention. I’m doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong. I did things to myself to make pain go away, because I’d rather hurt myself then someone else. Haters are haters but please don’t hate. . . . I hope I can show you guys that everyone has a story, and everyone’s future will be bright some day, you just gotta pull through. I’m still here, aren’t I?’’

Just a few weeks later — what happened? — she wasn’t.

So now the tributes, the condolences, pour in and Amanda’s video has gone viral. She’ll never know how many people cared, would have cared.

Her legacy is in the aftermath of tragedy. The B.C. coroner announced Friday that an investigation has been launched, warning that it will be long and complex, and the public should not expect instant answers. Barb McLintock said issues ranging from school and mental health support to cyber and social media bullying would be explored before any “reasonable and practical’’ recommendations could be made.

But how to reasonably and practically suppress the vomitorium of venom on social media? How to recondition teenagers numbed to the splatter of hatefulness?

How to convince them: Look a person in the face.

Social media is a tool without any conscience of its own. Yet it has become, in the hands of juveniles and the embittered, a malignancy.

There’s nothing to be done for sad Amanda anymore. Look around, though. Is there an Amanda in your house, in your class, among your Facebook “likes’’ or — shame on you — “hates”?

I wonder what those abusers think now. I wonder what, if anything, they’ll tell their grandchildren years from now, about the time they drove a fragile girl to kill herself. More probably they’ll never speak a word of it, bound only to each other by evil secrets.

Not acceptable to me. I want those kids to be tracked down and caught. I want to live in a country where what they did is a crime that they will be punished for.

no shit, they can use the resources they have to track a guy down for downloading movies...perhaps they need to start focusing on this type of horrible and ignorant behaviour.

I never liked or participated in that shit, even as a so called "cool kid" i was raised by mo mother to care for and help my peers... the parents of these kids should be so ashamed, SO ashamed of what the have failed to do.

i used to use the site funnystuff.com, there were some pretty funny photo's there. However, I just now noticed that there are a plethora of horrible Amanda Todd "jokes" on that site. I will never use it again.

I'm curious to see how this affects the younger guys here on our forums...how do you guys feel about this type of behaviour in your schools?

I can tell you, I'm 40, and when we were in school, although there was a little of this stuff, it was no place even remotely close to what it is now. Young people don't seem to have any compassion or empathy now, they just seem like little assholes. Its alarming, scary, and very, very sad.

I'm curious to see how this affects the younger guys here on our forums...how do you guys feel about this type of behaviour in your schools?

I can tell you, I'm 40, and when we were in school, although there was a little of this stuff, it was no place even remotely close to what it is now. Young people don't seem to have any compassion or empathy now, they just seem like little assholes. Its alarming, scary, and very, very sad.

I'm sure there were plenty of aholes back then too, lol. It really depends where your at, I know for me it wasnt that bad, but go 10 years back, it was a totally different scene, the people i knew that went to the same school i went to would get jumped everyday for going to 711 and grabbing something, it was ridoinkulous, it was covered up much better then it is now, but because of the internets, it seems worst, thats my honest opinion.

I'm curious to see how this affects the younger guys here on our forums...how do you guys feel about this type of behaviour in your schools?

I can tell you, I'm 40, and when we were in school, although there was a little of this stuff, it was no place even remotely close to what it is now. Young people don't seem to have any compassion or empathy now, they just seem like little assholes. Its alarming, scary, and very, very sad.

It depends. for my highschool I never had any trouble, and noone was malicious. everyone just stayed in their own "cliques" and was friendly when they had to interact for school or w/e. I was bullied when I was younger, but I gave him a nice "knuckle sandwhich" and he backed off. nearly got suspended hahaha

Not acceptable to me. I want those kids to be tracked down and caught. I want to live in a country where what they did is a crime that they will be punished for.

i agree 100%. i'd love to see a joint effort between countries to hold people accountable for their words and torment. there needs to be an interpol type of organization that's actively involved in cyber-bullying, simply because things like this cannot go on without consequence. i hope her life was enough sacrifice needed to bring the awareness to the communities both on and offline.

would i be out of line to say that i hope this blackmailer/stalker finds himself saran wrapped on dexter's table.